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As I’ve reported in my year ending summary, some estimate that spam now comprises 9 of all 10 email message currently sent. But more important, and something I have not covered, is exactly what all this spam cost.

The first, and most direct cost, is to service providers in the form of churn, or customer turn-over, obviously from customers angry with so much spam getting through to their email and looking for to change email accounts in hopes of getting less spam. But I'm looking at spam from more a corporate cost level.

Experts estimate that 90% of all business communications is now done electronically. So to figure out the cost of spam, I went to the spam cost calculator at Computer Mail Services. For a company of 50 people working 40 hour weeks with an average salary of 25 dollars per hour (the other variables were number of spam message a day, which I set at 25, and average number of seconds spent junking email, which I set at 2 seconds). According to those settings, the company lost a grand total of $4,166 dollars a year (this in no way calculates the cost of anyone getting scammed out of credit card or banking information).

Now I know that’s a pretty random number, as employees are not robots, and every employee second does not relate to a company’s bottom line. Obviously, employees waste time at work, but the spam calculator says that yearly, with 25 spam emails a day and 2 seconds wasted on each spam, a total of 5 hours a year is spent per employee on spam. Wouldn’t you much rather have that employee wasting that time talking with other employees and building company spirit then going down a list deleting one spam after another?

So therefore spam depletes company spirit: that's a whole 'nother cost entirely.

Posted by pschooff in Spam |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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